'Hag’s Head' is an evening wear collection that reflects where I grew up, the Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, and how the landscape, atmosphere, culture and flora have influenced my aesthetic. It tells the legend of Hag’s Head, the most westerly point of the cliffs, of a witch who fell in love with the Irish hero Cú Chulainn, her love ultimately leading to her demise, whereupon her body transformed the cliff face of Hag’s Head, as seen on the title page. The collection is an imagined embodiment of the area, drawing from the contradictory traits that define the landscape and people, the brutal, the conservative and the gothic, paired with the beauty, the kinship, and the ethereal. The collection features deformed tailoring and hyper-textured evening wear that both defines and rejects the body housed within. An all-black palette emphasises the mood and silhouettes of the pieces. The use of veils is both a reference to the Irish mythological figure of The Cailleach and a means to separate the self from the body. On a personal level the collection captures what it feels like to be from somewhere but never belonging to it. A manifestation of my feelings for the place I am from, it is the love for my home I have acquired in adulthood tempered with the hate I felt for it as an adolescent.
